The problem around Google Penguin Update, is that very soon after its release some starting complaining about examples of odd results, such as empty sites that were ranking well. Officials at Google soon replied by saying that all these issues were resolved and that they had only appeared before the official launch and they were not caused by the new anti-spam update. Another problem is caused by the fact that some say they were wrongfully hit by the anti-spam update as they were not doing spam at all. But once again the people at Google strongly disagree with this issue, accusing the ones who claim such things. More than this they have citied the fact that some have been profiting from the fact that others have lost in ranking and Google hasn’t heard a whisper from them.

This over optimization penalty actually takes a big shot at the black hat search engine optimization. This is the reason why the launch of Google Penguin Update is so important to all search engine optimization firms. Nevertheless, no one is claiming that the over optimization penalty is without flaws.  It seems that the Google Penguin Update was designed to act against pages only when the fact that they were spamming was obvious. So there is a possibility that some spam will get through, but no one can argue with the fact that the over optimization penalty will decrease by far the cases of spamming.

In case users that have been hit by the over optimization penalty want to recover they will not be able to do it with the old reconsideration request. The recovery will be done naturally, if they just clean up the spam and make sure that the anti-spam update will not find them again. Other ways in which you can recover are to clean up bad links which you have been involved with in the past, look for a new Google Penguin Update or if you are sure that you were falsely accused you can file a report.

The last group of webmasters thinks that if link exchange is done excessively, this can end up in being harmful for the site. I think that the quantity has no influence on the whole process. The most important thing here is the quality of the links. More than this, it is essential where the links come from and how trustworthy the other sites are in terms of relevance. As SEO link exchange is one of the most popular techniques of search engine optimization it is important to closely watch where the links are placed. The sites which link to your page are a reflection to your site. Visitors will only follow the link if they consider that page to contain relevant and useful information.

A very know technique of SEO Link exchange and also a good method of getting incoming links is to enter the site in a link exchange directory. These directories are usually divided by different themes such as IT, Business, Commerce or others. A directory can be seen like a catalog of sites which makes connections to other sites. It is of great importance to not think of directories as search engines. Signing up your site to a link exchange directory can prove to be a smart move and pay off. There are some practices to make this technique more effective: you should find the directories which best suit your site theme and when choosing between two similar categories you should choose the one with the best page rank. It is also good not to make the keywords in the description should too commercial.

Of course many site owners sign up their site to a free link exchange directory so that they don’t have to pay subscriptions or any other fees. But in my opinion a free link exchange directory also has its advantages and can bring a lot of SEO links.

First of all we have the title. For SEO firms it is important that the title is short, as long titles tend to minimize the effects of optimization. Short titles are easier to read by the users. It is also very important that the title reflects the topic of the article or page. As the title is the users’ first impact with the page, SEO firms know that they should not overlook it or minimize its importance. They focus on this are as much as they focus on the headlines and sub headlines. Similar to the titles, SEO firms think that it is important for the headline to give an idea about the ideas presented in the text.

The general aspect of the page is also a factor to be taken into consideration by SEO firms. It is important that the users be attracted to the page by means of visual effects. Therefore SEO firms have to focus on the background of the page, the font in which the text is written and any other pictures or small videos that may be available on that page.

After taking care of all the above the SEO firms have to give their utmost attention to the content. With the risk of repeating myself, I need to enhance the importance of the content and why the content is called the king. While promoting a page, SEO services which are provided for that particular page will work on emphasizing the importance of the information given in the text. The SEO firms know that If a user will read a page and find it useful for that particular subject, then it is a given fact he will recommend it to at least one other person. On the other hand, if the user is not satisfied with what he found on that page he will go and tell at least five other persons about the dissatisfaction and how he would not recommend that site to anyone.

There is a good reason for this, but in my opinion, it is a matter of perspective. It is true that the best SEO companies that operate on a small market such as the local ones: in a city or a group of cities, know the market better, they know the competition and competitors and it is easier for them to choose the best local SEO services that would apply for a certain business. For a SEO company, it is of an upmost importance that they know and control of the factors that influence the business environment in which they deliver the services.

A SEO company is as successful as their marketing campaigns are and they go from simple SEO firms to top SEO companies when all their clients are on top of the search results pages. Once these become top SEO companies they also have to improve the SEO services that they deliver and keep up with the changes. As they become more professional so must their tools and techniques. The capital that they invest has to increase and with it the budgets for the marketing campaigns. We are now at the stage of offering SEO services to the big players. These are companies that rely on marketing and understand the importance of it in such a competitive business environment. These kind of companies have marketing departments where only the best of the best professionals brainstorm for the most innovative ideas of promotion.

After such brainstorming sessions they turn to the best SEO companies which will in the end up in putting their ideas into actions and resulting in increasing the number of visitors on the business’s site and positioning it in the first three search results performed by any search engine. The best SEO companies assure business that in a matter of weeks, the name and brand of the business will be on everyone’s lips and will result in increase sales. After all, this is what everyone is looking for: increasing the sales and profits of the company.

In my opinion the best way to learn how to do SEO is to start doing it and learning along the way. You can read books and guides on how to do SEO but as long as you don’t practice it you will never become a pro. You know how the saying goes: practice makes perfect. So, let’s talk about what is and how to do SEO? The simplest of explanations would be that search engine optimization, which is short for SEO is a promotion and marketing tool for a site. Basically, there are two important types: on page SEO and off page SEO. You cannot learn how to do SEO without knowing these two important components and how they function. The most important on page SEO is definitely the content. Having a relevant, unique and creatively built content is the key to getting more and more visitors to your site. Another important on page SEO technique is having a well structured menu on your site. If the primary menu is organized and helps the user find whatever it is they are searching for in a rapid manner then this will definitely count as a plus. Last but not least an on page SEO technique that is useful is the visual part of the site. If the site is attractive to the human eye then the user will enjoy navigating the page and recommending it to others too. Using vivid colors always does the trick.

As I said the off page SEO is equally important, effective and useful when learning how to do SEO. The name of the link has to be well structured and it has to hint to the nature of the content. I find this to be one of the most important off page SEO techniques. Sending a press release that speaks about your site in any terms possible is also an off page SEO tool. I say any terms because we all know that there is no such thing as bad publicity. These are the most used tools as well as the ones that the users most rank as effective and award five stars to. But learning how to do SEO is a complex process and it takes time and practice. With the help of these articles and others such as it you can say that you know how to do SEO for beginners and that you have a base for all future information.

SEO is practiced by bloggers and professionals to bring traffic to their websites or their customers websites for free from search engines, and when I say search engines I mean Google, because that’s where the big traffic comes from. If you want to practice SEO you must first understand what is SEO, and how destructive can SEO be if you use it unwisely.

There are 2 types of SEO that you can practice, white hat SEO and black hat SEO. White hat SEO is all about getting your site viral and getting organic backlinks from bloggers and other sites, which is extremely hard and time consuming while black hat SEO is about using blasting software and automated link building tools to spam blogs, forums and web 2-0 sites with spun content and “that’s nice” comments. Black hat SEO is wrong, and won’t get you anywhere in the long term and white hat SEO is extremely hard to execute and you need to make your site viral before you can receive those high quality contextual organic backlinks.

So which type of SEO should you practice? Well I’m not here to tell you which one to choose, I’m here to make you understand what is SEO and to present all your options so you can choose which one suits you best. An optimum option would be to combine white hat SEO and black hat SEO and get faster results for longer term duration. This is called gray hat SEO, and it is used by most of the professionals that have learned that automation and spun content will never trick Google but in order to gain organic links you have to give your site a starting bump up the SERPs.

What is gray hat SEO? Well, it is way better than black hat SEO and less luck-based than white hat SEO. Basically, after you finish your on-page SEO and content writing you should start building backlinks that look as natural as possible. How should you build those backlinks? Well, there are various methods depending on your budget or time to spend and I’m going to list them below along with their advantages and disadvantages.

Blog Commenting and Forum Posting

Blog commenting and forum posting might get you valuable high quality links but it’s very time consuming and with a low success rate. Of course you can outsource this to a VA on odesk and save you time but it will add extra expenses to your SEO campaign.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking can bring extra link juice but it is not enough to rank medium competition keywords. If you choose to use social bookmarking you must either target low competition keywords or use an extra backlinking method to help. There are certain tools that can help you automate the bookmarking process, but don’t automate it too much because you risk falling into the dark side.

Private Blog Networks

Private blog networks can help you achieve good rankings for almost any keyword, depending on your niche and budget. There are a couple of popular private blog networks, and they’re all good. If you decide on using blog networks than I’d suggest that you pick at least 2 for diversifying your inbound links a little, as some of them offer homepage links and other inner page links.

So what is SEO after all? Well, it’s 90% link building and 10% planning and on-page optimization. Subscribe to my blog and you’ll be the first to know about new link building tools and fresh SEO tips as soon as they hit the online world.

On-page SEO means the optimization of your site’s pages to meet Google’s requirements: faster load times, title tags, META descriptions, keyword rich content and so on. This is the easy part, and it can be done with ease by almost anybody as there are only a few guidelines that you should follow, but as this blog is focused on link building we’re going to skip the on-page SEO tutorial and focus more on link building strategies.

Of-page SEO is also known as Link Building and it is the most important part of SEO ( 90% of the whole SEO process ). As Google and other search engines constantly update their algorithms, SEO link building gets harder and harder and as the old link building strategies are discovered by search engines new ones emerge fueling the cat and mouse game called SEO.

If you want to make your link building efforts count than you must build your links that look natural and come from high quality relevant pages from all over the web. Well, getting links is hard enough, but building high quality links is almost impossible if you have a fairly new website and want to build links in the old fashion, thru blog commenting and forum posting. This is where link building companies step in, and offer high end SEO assets like private blog networks and automated software. I personally hate automated link building software, because everybody uses them, and they quickly become useless as patterns emerge and search engines detect and ignore all the links built with them.

About Private Blog Networks, well, they are the real deal. You have to know that SEO firms and Internet Marketers build their own private blog networks that they use only for their business and build links only to their sites or their client’s sites. Building a blog network is expensive and it requires a lot of knowledge and work to keep it under Google’s radar, but a blog network can make the difference. Why? Because a good private network will have at least 200 or 300 high Page Rank, high authority blogs that will link to your site and this will trick Google into thinking that your site is important, thus placing it in the top of the search results.

A link built from a Page Rank 3 page counts more than 3000 links built from a Page Rank 0 page, and you will be getting hundreds of those, from hundreds of different aged, trusted, high Page Rank blogs.

So, to make it more simple, Private Blog Networks are the link building strategy of the future ( or at least of 2012 ) and if don’t have one yet than I suggest that you build one, or use one built by somebody else.

You don’t afford building your own blog network but you want to succeed with your SEO link building campaigns? No problem, you can just “rent” one from companies that offer these kind of link building services and instead of paying $10000-$20000 for building a network of your own with 100 sites, you can rent 100 of their blogs for $100 – $200 / month.

One of the most popular and efficient blog networks is available at “ThePrivateNetwork.net”, and I have to say that they also have the lowest prices out there. This is only a hint for to get you started, but there are lots of other blog networks out there, but make sure that you make the right choice once you decide to join.

This is it for now, but stay tuned as I will post all the latest SEO link building strategies and tips as soon as they emerge.